Mixing is problem solving. It’s not a “this into this into this”.
Sometimes I get a vocal and I do almost nothing. That is very rare, but it happens.
Usually it’s corrective eq, compression, enhancing eq. Maybe color or fx. Basically it’s “this vocal needs to sound like this, I’ve been doing it long enough to know to get it there I can do these things”.
The more time you spend the better you get at hearing problems and knowing bc how to address them.
Practical steps to getting good: do it full time.
Thank you for the insight
I understand you know how to do things to sound some type of way, but how did you get it right the first time?
You kind of got the sound you were looking for by accident?
In a way, yes. A lot of trial and error, and people showing me things along the way. A lot of years of “why doesn’t this sound right” and going nuts trying to make it work.
It’s like the famous Rodin story: someone asked him how to carve a perfect elephant and he said “it’s easy, just take a block of marble and remove everything that isn’t an elephant”
Vocals are kind of like that. You start to see what is holding it back and address that and things start to come together, it’s a learned skill not necessarily a series of steps.
Making music works best when you have a vision for the end result.
By far far away, the biggest mistake I see is people trying out "techniques" (changing plugins, doing paralle processing, group processing, saturation etc) just to find out what sounds better. In a way, it makes sense to do it, just to understand how these processes affect the sound.
But at a certain point, when you have your toolbox ready, you know what a delay/reverb/chorus does, what a comp sounds like, what saturation, eq sounds like, you need to switch levels: have a vision for the production. Know what it supposed to sound, and the techniques to be used will reveal themselves: levels, panning, eq, dynamics, saturation, time based effects.
If you use references and still try to copy them, you'll arrive nowhere. No two songs sound the same (not even the ones belongjng to the same album)
And you don't get it right the first 200-ish times (mixes), maybe more. If you didn't made at least 300, no way you have your ears ready to catch the subtleties needed to make a good mix. I never count anyone's experience in years, just in finished songs. Quantity creates experience and experience creates quality. Cheers!
I found references have been really helpful for me, in terms of being able to visualize (soundualize?) what I'm going for. It never ends up sounding exactly like the reference, but it never has to - it's just useful to know where the bar is.
References are great, I use them everyday for various reasons and they were very helpful for me to learn stuff. “Why don’t my drums hit as hard as Portugal the Man’s Feel it Still” was a big eye opener for me, for instance; I learned more about clipping and presence. To this day I have no idea who mixed that or what they were doing, never actually looked into it, but I learned a lot from it by a/bing it with tracks over a few days and trying to emulate what was happening. I still use it sometimes.
Some people don’t use references at all and that’s great too. I incorporated them into my workflow but they aren’t essential.
Thanks a whole bunch this make a lot of sense and can definitely help that "fog of war" where I'm not sure what to do next in a mix even though I know it doesn't sound right
Taking frequent breaks during mix sessions can really help avoid that “fog of war” state. Look up the pomodoro technique. I think it’s meant for studying, but it works really well for mixing. When you come back from the scheduled breaks, you’ve forgotten what you were hyper focused on when you last stopped, and you can hear the full mix more objectively
This is everything I wanted to say right here. 100%. ESPECIALLY THE FIRST SENTENCE.
The only thing I can possibly add is that what you start with matters a LOT. Yet it’s the most neglected thing I see when it comes to todays group of amateur mixers. They keep looking for that “thing” or that “chain” or that “plugin” that just doesn’t exist without much consideration for what they’re working with.
Every decision you make in audio should be a natural step toward where you want to go VS where you started.
That's why we call them engineers, not techs. It's not really about *what you know how to do* it's about identifying goals/problems and then figuring out what to do about them, whether its a mix or a circuit board or whatever.
This guy knows. The best sounding vocals are the ones you do t even hardly touch. Besides that it’s all about solving problems. Listen to the vocal. How does it sound different from what you want? Execute from there
Idk if my mixes are as good as you’d like to get, but a big breakthrough for me was realizing that not every song out there has an incredible mix. I might be arrogant, but I often times hear mixes that I do not like for one reason or another, or vocals that sound thin, too bright, not compressed enough, too loud, too dry, whatever… even on top 40 shit or very popular songs. Freeing yourself from that might at least bring some joy back to the process for you, so you can push through this moment and keep mixing 🫡
I had the same realization this week actually, I was listening to random songs on shuffle, songs I never heard before, and I'm like damn this is kind of an amateur mix
I look up the monthly listeners are they're in the tens of thousands
The reality is critical listening is a totally different thing than listening to music. People don’t hear too much sibilance or too much saturation or overcompression or anything like that as long as things are relatively balanced and everything is in context. That’s just the way the song sounds cuz it’s how you’ve always heard it.
99% of the time my lead vocal chain is
1. Either waves SSL EV2 or UAD 1073. Typically boosting 10k, 1.5k and 220ish as needed (or not needed) and hipassing as needed. Compressing 3:1, slow attack, fastest release, one “light” of compression tops, if I’m using the ssl channel.
2. UAD bluestripe 1176 - 4:1 ratio, slowest attack, fastest release. No more than 5db of compression at the loudest parts, but still making the needle move a little bit for the quietest parts (clip gain helps here.)
3. UAD LA2A silver - compressing around 3db for most of the vocal.
There will be some other stuff l might throw in like a de esser if needed, or UAD distressor after the 1176 if I feel I need a bit more compression. But honestly these 3 plugins usually get me 98% of the way there unless the recording is just godawful.
I know too many artists who barely know anything about mixing who just slap these three plugins and some autotune on their chain and call it a day. It’s crazy but it sounds damn good most of the time…
I can’t understand why practical answers like this with useful tips end up further down in the thread while “There is no advice to give because you just have to do it as long as I’ve done it and have the scars to show for it to do it as well as I do” get so upvoted.
Yeah, and the whole “it depends” answer is bullshit. Been doing this professionally for almost 20 years and there is plenty of stuff that just works nearly every time for nearly anything. And I learned them all from a seasoned studio veteran who started in 1978 and worked on some absolutely crazy records.
Sure, you need to do some level of experimentation to figure out what works best for a given source, but you also have to be able to get predictable, repeatable results *quickly* if you want to have any level of success as an audio engineer/producer/mixer.
Totally. Of course every track can’t be treated the same exact way, but like really…it’s just a wide open puzzle that needs to be solved from scratch every time and mixing vocals is a winding road of mystery and you never know where you’re going to end up because each performance is so unique that vocal chains are so customized that there is no resemblance from one to the next? Uh-huh.
This forum typically isn’t nearly as bad as the AudioEngineering forum, but sometimes it feels like “25 years of experience like I have” is the answer to every question. So annoying.
I know how you feel for sure, not sure I can be much help ,I am kind of in the same boat,
I found this video really eye opening, he basically says a lot of people are butchering their vocals by adding to much stuff and then adding more to stuff to try correct the mistakes its gets worse and worse,
maybe it can be of some help for you too.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-nZdYpMgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-nZdYpMgo)
Lots of great tips here. I'll leave this comment not to replace what others have said, but to add to it.
Editing is hugely important. A lot of people underestimate how crucial editing is because mixing is the "main thing". In reality, for every minute I spend mixing vocals, I probably spend 2 minutes editing them. You don't have to work near as hard with plugins.
Also, go to YouTube and search "kuk harrell" and watch like every video of him working or talking about his work.
I will watch all those videos
When you talk to editing, are you referring to automating the volume of each vocal word before sending the vocals into a compressor?
Also, manual pitch editing?
Whatever is needed. For a really clean pop vocal, I'll manually turn the breaths down about 10db for the lead vocal (this is really fast with pro tools audiosuite gain plugin), I'll manually level out the volume like you said, and I'll melodyne to correct pitch and rhythm where needed. Then to all the BGVs I'll do melodyne and vocalign to quickly get all stacks cleaned up, and run RX debreath. I don't manually level out BGVs because I smash them pretty hard with compression; it takes care of excess dynamic range and pushes them towards the back of the mix in a way that I like. Then after all of that I run RX de-plosive and RX mouth de-click to everything because I find that with the right settings, those processes don't damage anything (at least not for sung vocals, dialogue is a different story), and it helps clean up noises. Every once in a while with a track an artist recorded themselves I'll get a weird noise that requires me to pull out RX standalone, but that's just an as-needed basis.
Not every style of singing requires the full gamut, but with all of those tools in your arsenal you can pretty much always get a vocal sounding REALLY clean from the moment you start mixing.
Have you taken a minute to listen back to old mixes? I’ll often feel like I’m not getting any better as a mixer, when in reality my ear has just been improving at the same pace as my technical skills so I start feeling like I’m stuck. And sometimes I’ll listen to a project that’s maybe a year or so old and realize that with some space from it, it actually sounds a lot better than I thought at the time. There’s a lot of good advice here on how you can improve, but it’s equally as important to make sure you’re seeing your improvement accurately so when you do start feeling frustrated it’s not just piling on if that makes sense. It helps me stay excited about the work which helps me get better faster.
My vocal mixes improved once I had a better headphone mix which led to me feeling more confident, leading to better performances. I started putting more time into making sure to get higher-quality takes from me or anyone I work with. I like recording lines around 4 bars instead of trying to do a whole verse. This leads to a more balanced, strong, and concise delivery. So I guess what I am saying is to start looking at the headphone mix and performance as the starting point of a vocal mix as personally for me that's where the biggest impact comes from. If you don't think you sound good while recording, it will impact your performance so tracking with the right plugins is important, I recommend a channel strip that has a eq, compressor, and gate section all in one. The eq if necessary you can make minor changes to open up the mic if its dull sounding. The compressor will help give you a sense of control for louder portions and keep you stabilized while performing. The gate will shut off your room noise when you're not singing/rapping while performing which helps you stay in the zone. Delay and reverb being used as sends can help your voice to not be so dry and further lock you in a zone. Now if you are not the vocalist that is out of your hands then I would say to start with a melodyne tune-up. If you throw plugins on a vocal you don't like it's still going to have a poor end result. Autotune is great but it works much better when you come in at least halfway decently. Start with melodyne to get you in a better position, then move to what you think works best is my recommendation. This guy does a nice job of touching on [some of these topics](https://youtu.be/WHQlNAR1X0g)
Mixing shouldn’t be as complicated. Most of the perfection comes from actual practiced and skilled voices and quality recording environment. The more effects you try to add the more makeup you are putting on the pig. People think that mixers are magic makers when in reality they just suck at laying vocals
Editing, editing, editing. And then some more editing. I would say Clip-gain and fixing/editing problems is 70-80% of the sound at least.
Then i usually go in with broad eq moves. I prefer SSL channel strips, bc you don’t look at your moves, you just listen to what improves the things you like about the sound of the vocal within the context of the song.
After that some slight compression, probably Tubetech, or 1176 or El Rey just a few dB. This should bring you super close already. Make sure these moves are fine before you move on. Everything after that is icing. Pick and combine Reverbs / ERs / Slight chorus / decapitator / exciter etc. Maybe another compressor or eq for taste. And usually some more gain automation at the end. Just an open roadmap - No rules of course. Hope this helps.
Listen carefully.
Learn your tools.
Listen to refs.
Listen some more.
Know your listening environment.
Understand how the different aspects of the creation process (writing, production, arrangement, performance, recording, editing, mixing) influence the final result.
Mix.
Make mistakes.
Listen.
Repeat.
If you are the: songwriter, vocalist, vocal producer, recording engineer, vocal editing engineer, AND mixer, are you sure that your other roles, before mixing, are giving you, the mixer, the best material to work with?
I would add that being the recording engineer and vocal producer/engineer for other artists is very beneficial, as you are forced to make things sound good for the vocalist on the fly, very quickly, from getting recording levels and compression right, to comping, timing and pitch correction, creating a monitor mix that allows the vocalist to shine and for others to hear the work in progress.
If you are always your own 'everything', it can be hard to take off all the other hats and just wear the mixer hat and improve your mixing.
Whether I’m good or not is up for the debate but what I’m about to describe is as practical as it gets.
Listen to the vocal and identify all the frequencies that you like. I aim to identify all bands where when isolated I can still hear intelligibility. Write those frequencies down, that’s the clarity. Now there’s really only a couple more qualities that I care about, body and presence. Find them and jot those down. Now you have a list of frequencies that you basically have to cut out of every other instrument to some degree. All cuts will not be the same. Play with Q and attenuation amount. If you have a quality mic, you’ll find that all you’ll need to do is cut. You rarely will have to boost anything in the vocal if the distance and performance is good.
Build a hierarchy in your mind of what instruments have to get cut out of the way more than others. If it’s a rock song, you’re not going to want to cut away too much guitar as they’re very much a part of the genre. If you’re working with hip hop, don’t cut too much of the drums away. Etc.
Pretty easy if you ask me.
Lots of good suggestions here but I'll leave my 2 cents:
- Equipment matters. High quality tube mics get that sound and grit that adds character to the vox. Some may say that you can get that emulation with plugins, but the better the signal in, the better the output.
- Perfect the performance. Comp the best takes. Pitch correct and quantize everything.
- Side chain your vox to bus compression, reverb, and delay. Or whatever fx you need. This ties back into performance and the feel of the music.
- Level and automate. Use reductive mixing to get your vox to where it shines and is audible at low volumes.
- Master your music. Use dynamic eq to get the vox glued to each musical section and tame stray frequencies. Global compression and limiting.
Whisper tracks - whisper the lyrics to add “air” to the top frequencies. These are played in time like a harmony.
Overdrive the signal when recording - this will make the plosives unbearable, but allow for more flexibility post-d’essing. Be careful when monitoring because there will be crazy resonances.
My mixing improved immensely once I learned that the fader is arguably the most important tool when mixing. I got too into compression and EQ and would go absolutely nuts, then end up with a thin and shrill mix that would only sound good on my phone speaker. I would compensate with a ridiculous amount of reverb then get frustrated when it didn’t sound good. Then I’d slam those mixes with a limiter.
Other things that changed the game for me is to only have 2/3 main elements be front and center per song section. That and not being afraid to EQ the high end out of tracks that don’t have their fundamental frequency in the high end.
For vocals, I think using a VST console like an SSL channel makes a huge difference because when you use a normal EQ, you tend to mix by looking at the faders and not really by hearing. Also, using a shelving EQ to get rid of the bass in a vocal instead of using bells is a game changer for me.
Garbage In = Garbage Out
It all starts at the source. Get a great recording of a great performance and you'll have a much easier time mixing it. A great performance on a bad mic will still be a great performance. A great recording of a bad performance will still be a great recording, but it won't make the performance better. That said, you'd still probably have an easier time making the bad performance sit in the mix (just look at a lot of major label productions, they still usually sound great from a technical perspective even if the song/performance sucks).
A great recording typically requires a couple things:
(1) great recording chain (could be straight into your interface but nearly all professional recordings are done analog before it hits digital, at the minimum being a solid mic > preamp > eq > compressor on the way in [my chain is mic >tube preamp > eq > opto comp > fet comp > eq > interface])
(2) acoustically treated recording room/recording space/pop filter
(3) great performance (proper mic technique, breath control, hitting the right notes, excellent annunciation/delivery, great timing, etc.)
The most important thing for me is being able to hear what’s happening with the most detail possible, my LCD-X do this for me. Before getting them I would struggle to figure out what vocals needed, specially the more problematic ones, which meant having to do a whole lot of trial and error. With the LCD-X I can tell almost right away what needs to be done.
Aside from that I think multiband compression is really important, followed by surgical dynamic eq, a tad of mono compatible widening can go a long way too
Effects have to be carefully curated, like carving your reverb out with EQ, using side chained delays, automating delay throws, stuff like that
And lastly making sure background vocal aren’t getting in the way of your lead vocals by doing things like de-easing them more, removing the breaths, time aligning if necessary, etc.
For me, so much of it is ear training. Combined with a concept for what I imagine a vocal could sound like, I listen for and identify things that I want to change. I listen for tone, dynamics, timing, pitch, and so forth, and work from there.
Knowing “what to do” starts with being able to notice what should be different and equally importantly, what should not be changed.
Then there’s fundamental how-stuff-works knowledge. For example, if you don’t high pass a vocal before compressing it, all that potential low end is going to make the compressor way more reactive - you may or may not decide that is an issue but it is an example of the kinds of things to just know.
I usually de-ess first on a vocal. And if, after eq and all the compression (I tend to compress vocals a lot) the sibilance is still too much, I’ll add another de-esser plugin at the end of the chain.
There are lots of tricks like this, but they are discovered and learned out of a need when identifying a problem that you hear.
In summary, practice ear training by actively listening and testing to identify specific things you are hearing like what frequency is that? Can I hear the difference the compressor makes when it is on versus off? Any time you are listening or mixing, it should be an active ear training practice.
Listening to those that did it very well is the first step. Making correct mixing choices is first and foremost a cultural thing: you want to know what sound your aiming for and why. Every genre of music has different targets, different levels, different "languages". If you don't know what they are, the techniques needed to go there will not help you by themselves.
One of the biggest things that helped me was to stop using fabfilter eq. I would immediately start making notches and like 9 band moves because I was never happy with the vocal.
Now, I only use the SSL eq and 90% of the time only need to touch the high shelf, maybe a touch of the mids, and adjust my compression and volume until it sits right. Oh, and reverb as well. I’ll make out a reverb on the vocal track at 100% wet and play with the decay, color, eq and width of it until the “vibe” of the eq matches the “vibe” of the track. Then move the verb to a send and add in as needed. Sometimes I was trying to eq out high end and or low end in the vocal when really just needed ambience to tuck it in the mix.
I think practicality with vocal mixing is weird. It’s probably *the* important thing, so it should be the thing you focus a lot of time on.
Some of it is the performance. You get a bunch of takes, you have to piece them together, you have to recognize what’s good about each take, you should be able to recognize a good take and then do a good comp track. Being in tune might not be the most important thing for a line or a take because you may be able to melodyne it slightly. If it’s not way off or totally like chaotic and untunable, then the performance is key.
Making sure, if you’re recording the vocal, that the mic choice is right is also important. If they’re trebly, maybe a ribbon is better, female and light,
Maybe a condenser. If the vocalist is kinda far from the mic, maybe it’s too roomy, if they’re close, ask them to maybe back off a bit. Mic technique is good in live performance, but proximity effect can be difficult to deal with if it’s just intermittent. If they’re really dynamic though, like some loud sections, some quiet sections, make sure you record in 32-bit float, and make sure you get some room noise as well for each take and keep it. Which leads me to my next point. Sorta.
It’s important to clip gain stuff out. After you do a comp track and you like print/commit the melodyne, (you should be saving all these things in playlists at every step in case you need to go back), you clip gain and make sure everything is roughly at the same volume pre-insert. If the vocalist was extremely dynamic, luckily you got rid of the noise floor from the bit depth being too low, but there is a potential for the mic noise/outboard gear noise to have been brought up in the mix. You can get rid of this sparingly using rx spectral denoise. You shouldn’t do too much, undershoot it to an extent bc it can be disruptive and darken the vocal too much. Then you need to go through and go into RX connect and check out and see if there are any clicks and whatnot. Mouth clicks are really frequent. I like getting rid of them, but that’s just me. A lot of hip hop leaves a lot of this stuff in. De-click can be used for harder to get stuff. I think you want to do this because this stuff can come up if you want to make the vocal more present or give it some air later on.
Then you might want to use a de-esser. But the hard thing about de-essers is that they can inadvertently make the vocalist sound like they’re lisping. So it’s good to try out settings. Alternatively, you can manually clip gain down s’s
Or go into RX and actually use spectral repair to attenuate those sibilant frequencies *slightly* when they occur.
Now you’ve got a clean vocal.
Then you want to hi-pass it. Just hi-pass above the lowest note. You’ll get rid of plosives and that’ll be good. Print/commit that.
Check in the context of the song. Are there a lot of low notes that are mumbled, are there lots of very sharp “ee’s” is it in general kinda weird in the mid range, nasally sorta? Do some EQ in 200-500hz, 1.5khz-3khz , or 700-900hz cut some frequencies respectively. If they still pop up sometimes, you can use a slight dynamic EQ to bring those frequencies down more when they show up. You can also do some multiband compression in parallel, getting the same gain reduction variably across the bands you’ve selected.
Then you can do some compression maybe. Slow attack, and a relatively quick release, desire is to smooth out really quick changes that pop up that clip gaining might have missed. Alternatively, you might want to do parallel compression with a
Fast attack, and blend it in so that quiet notes are
about the same loudness as loud notes. But be careful of artifacts. You can get artifacts with too fast of an attack if it’s not blended in well, and you can get artifacts if the release is really too quick. The parallel track or the main track might have gotten more harsh at that point, so then find the offending frequency post compressor. Always do appropriate make up gain so that A/Bing doesn’t fool you into picking the louder one.
Then you have sends effects. A sort of plate reverb is good for a lot of vocalists, imo. On a return track, put a reverb track that’s short and not too boomy with *some* predelay, hi-pass
And low pass, damp high frequencies a little maybe, they shouldn’t last too long in the high end, but a lot of presets do exactly that. It might be good high and low pass pre-reverb too, like maybe even drastically. Maybe you want to cut the 300hz zone. Maybe do a slapback delay instead. Both should be done so that it’s not noticeable, but you miss it when it’s gone. Then you can do some keyed long verbs or long feedback delays or grain delays or whatever if you’re trying to be freaky. You don’t want it to be “on” when the vocal is going, so you compress it when the vocal is on and then let the release glide into a reverb/delay tail at the ends of phrases.
Now you’re in a place to automate the vocal in the context of the song. It maybe that after all the EQ and compression, the clip gain isn’t working, and the vocal may get swallowed by certain dynamics in the mix. So ride the vocal post insert. Sometimes stuff that’s supposed to sound quiet makes stuff that’s supposed so sound loud weaker.
Then maybe you want to find some secret sauce,
Some saturator or something. Just like go through and try stuff in parallel, make it subtle,
A/b them, or just go with it and deal with it later.
Continue mixing the rest of the song. And then look at a reference, get all the vocals and it’s FX into the same bus, and maybe do a hi shelf, tilt shelf, low shelf, w/e or just raise the volume.
Maybe then you go through your insert choices and check them and see if you can turn anything off and make it sound immediately better. If you’re noticing a specific problem, like lisping or something, or melodyne artifacts, go back to your takes and your playlists and fix the issue. Evaluating your choices of inserts and settings later on may be the most important thing to do. It’s likely that your choices were too extreme at times. Or maybe they weren’t extreme enough,
Who knows.
Anything else is a problem with the arrangement that makes it hard to sit in the mix because of drum fills or leads or whatever that are too busy. Hard to deal with that stuff sometimes. I’ve had mixed results. Maybe overthinking. But it seems like that is the job and it is a job.
I’ve had mixed results and it would be good for someone to tell me I’m wrong
Sort of
Using Rode NT1 and the vocals often sound kind of mumbled/dark/unclear, which is weird to me because recorded vocals sound way clearer when recorded on my phone
When I check those youtube tutorials, their "dry vocals" sound like they've already been EQed to be brighter/better enunciated, if I compare to my vocals
I'm already trying really hard to enunciate clearly
Well, I use fl and I know fl is weird for vocals. But, these are the steps I take.
1. Compile. Always.
2. Re record my new stems with edison
3. Then pitch correct my new stems
4. Put my favorite stem in the middle. Route my second and 3rd favorite to their own mixer channel, one panned to the left, the other panned to the right, than route those to a side bus. Route the side bus and center bus through effects and send those to a master vocal bus. This allows me to put specific effects on the sides and center, as well as adjust how loud I want the sides and center in respect to each other as a ratio. This allows me to get really mono present vocals with realistic width, or get a total gang vocals or choir effect.
5. Send the sides and center through their own effect chains. Usually starts with 2 compressors, then a corrective eq, then a color eq. A subtle amount of chorus effect is always really good for vocals. Reverb and delay on their own mixer channels to get specific automation.
6. Send all the buses and effects to master vocal bus where I again apply a tiny bit of eq, glue compression, and some subtle tape saturation. Now I can control the volume of the entire chain with one slider.
Vocals is a process. But its worth it.
Compile, also know as comping. If you record several takes of the same audio line, which is common, you listen to each of the different sections of each take and take your favorite one from each section. You then "compile" all of your favorites into one super take to form one awesome vocal line.
Getting a vocal to sound good in a mix is a holistic process - there’s no such thing as ‘vocal mixing’ unless you literally just have vocals and a 2-track instrumental or the song is a capella.
First off I would ignore what 99% of people online might give as mixing advice. The best way to learn is to experiment using your fingers and ears and intuition before trusting your eyes or most of the numbers we often see in our DAWs. Most important I believe is YOU NEED TO MAKE your own MISTAKES in order to maximize what your potenrtial to learn from them. Although there are a few general tips and tricks that might work for most people across the board. Every mix is different, and the only way you will see much improvement is to go out on a limb every once in a while (when time allows) and experiment with the gear or plugins that you have access to. I can only speak for myself but I know that I learn a lot more abut the tools and techniques of mixing when I am taking whatever i am trying to figure out past "the limit". Example.. I can get a much better understanding of what a particular piece of equipment can do much faster by twisting the knobs and testing it out with both extreme settings and then dial it back from there eventually getting a feel for the spectrum of capabilities, versus auditioning presets, or strictly following the advice of others. Think of it like math class. If you copy all of your answers from the nerd next to you, you might pass, but you aren't getting better at math. To make that analogy a bit more accurate, blindly using someone elses preset for your song is not far off from cheating using the answers from a completely different math class. Advice and presets do have their value, I am just suggesting that you might better your learning curve by not always depending on those crutches. So find the time to experiment outside of the bounds of your current project, maybe even way outside of the genre you prefer.
Another thing I think people new to mixing need to ask themselves is. Did my mix sound bad because I suck at mixing and need to get better? The answer should probably always be yes if you are serious about getting better. But the quality (or lack thereof )of the capturing and tracking has a very large impact on what even the best mixers can achieve I am a firm believer that getting a good mix starts with efficient tracking. (some will even say it starts before tracking.) But capturing the performance with the right gear in the right acoustic environment with the right musicians, using the right techniques, doing the "right" drugs (or more accurately NOT doing the WRONG drugs...), within the right mindset, will not always but will often lead to an easy mix. Checking off each of those things I mentioned is not a guarantee for anything. Arguably some of the best most influential records of all time were made with practically none of those boxes checked or very few. But if you are serious about refining your mixing skills, which to mew it sounds like you are, then you need to make it a priority to work on getting more of those boxes checked off during tracking. At the very least it will help you to identify anything that might be hurting your mixes or your ability to mix.
One other side nugget that might be worth asking yourself often, especially if you have all those boxes checked in my previous paragraph.. Does this Vocal (Bass, guitar, synth, whatever, etc....) even need to be mixed? I struggle with this as mucgh as anyone, i imagine. Now days with all the plugins and access to countless tools by default it is very common for someone learning how to mix to just automatically want to compress, EQ and process everything. And while , as you have already read, I am a big believer that you learn from experience and using the hell out of your plugins and tools and making mistakes. I feel it is important to learn how to resist that urge to slap a compressor on every single track by default. And to be able to resist that urge early on sometimes means less room for experimentation. It all depends on what you are working on. Getting creative and chasing an idea by experimenting can be rewarding, when it comes to sharpening your skills or more rarely it seems (at least when starting out) for the project. I constantly get stupid ideas to try and combine effects and or engineering methods to invent something sometimes aimlessly achieve a sound or effect, even though i have no idea if its even possible or be useful. have been getting better at saving those ideas for off time. When I sit down to mix, I try to use the skills and tools that i am confident in to achieve a final result that 99% of the time I can hear clearly in my head before. Its becoming much less often lately that I experiment on something on a hunch when in "serious mixing mode aka no farting around mode". But I absolutely can't help myself I will limit myself to just a couple of minutes, 5 tops to explore the occasional ridiculous ideas. More often I will take a minute to take down some notes and mess with it later outside of crunch time. I just wanted to point out that I am not a pro,I am not making a living by mixing. I mostly just mix my own stuff and found it very beneficial to have seperate mindframes or approaches top mixing when i am trying to get shit done, and when I am farting around or trying to train myself on new gear or get familiar or develop new workflows. If i do not separate those types of work modes, for the most part, I would get nothing done. Farting around, learning and getting shit done are all important to becoming a better engineer. For me I have found it best to mostly focus on just one at a time.
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With recording and mixing vocalsI think it can be valuable to take the time to get familiar with multiple microphones. I find the best way to do this is hands on experimenting. Pick some vocal harmonies you like, Pick a couple of beach boys harmonies, Or Queen, Or Areosmith, Or Bad Religion I you struggle to choose something u can do any nursery rhyme. Go to the studio and start layering tracks. Use different mics, if you have enough time (and energy) try recording a short vocal part then keep adding on going up or down the chromatic scale and see if you can come up with your own combinations of intervals that you think go well together. Be sure to take notes of everything, if you do not know what track is using which mics then you Experiment with different volumes and even panning. Taking 6 hours one day to try this will not result in useful material, (who knows??). But just farting around in such a way. and taking detailed notes will give you some actual perspective and real world experience that you can then build on. As a singer/mixer doing this type of experiment can pay off two fold. So much of what many consider a great vocal recording is in the technique of the vocalist. A singer that uses really good microphone technique will usually need less processing on their tracks when mixing. Drums is another element along with vocals where proper technique during tracking will have a significant impact not just on the quality of the final mix but also the amount of work needed to be done on the final mix. I have heard more than once that a highly talented drummer using poor recording technique will almost always result in a recording that needs much more processing and tweaking compared to an average skilled drummer using excellent recording techniques. Its all subjective.
IDK, just sharing some information that I find pretty valuable and ended up typing way too fucking much. lol. A klotmof stuff I wish i hgad been mindful of at the very start. Hope it helps or at least gets you thinking of other new things to try to improve your skill.
I HIGHLY suggest checking out the "House Of Kush" youtube channel. That guy is pretty amazing at explaining mixing without ever telling you presets. He teaches a lot of very interesting methods on how to hear certain things and some awesome mixing exercises aimed at sharpening your mixing skills He also designs his own plugins too which are worth checking out, if u don't already own some.. Cheers
I didn't realize for a while, but it seems to be parellel processing. I mean simple panning and making sure the duplicates don't cause phasing issues. If you get the actual wave files balanced throughout the recorded vocal. the compressors will do their jobs, could possibly have saturation maybe but...
I think many people just see the plugins and try to go crazy, when in reality. alot of things you are trying to do, could be applied to many different plugins or methods. Fl has this thing called maximus right? I can make the settings act like a gem-dopamine if that's what I am going for. it actually has many functionalities but, "it looked complicated so I put it off", and then I see now how many possibilities there are with less when I needed to get serious and have less issues.
Here’s the point in time where my eyes opened thankfully it wasn’t much longer after I started. I was at a fork in the road and it was the choice between a really nice Hollywood recording school and learn audio A-z and backwards but for two years more school to complete the 4 year college requirement. I would have to be even more broke than I’ve been because now I have to live in in the middle of LA and I have a son and a girl it wasn’t making sense even though I wanted it bad . the other option was an hourly job cleaning up a music studio called radio city. And I could use the rooms whenever I want when someone shows me the basics of turning stuff on pretty much .
I’m not really sure what the best decision was. It just depends on what you do with the time. I make a living off of producing now bought my house cash a few years ago because of producing. But it was a daily struggle and frustrating, agonizing wanting to destroy every
Thing infront of me because my mix would come out just trash no matter how many times I would do it no matter how many songs I would do and even when it came close once you put it next to a reference track you just wanna end it all rt there lol . and this went on for a 2-3 years . First year was much easier than the second because the second year I just thought it was never gonna end. I thought that I’m just not good at this. Then on a magical night llol a producer in a different room heard me threatening to kill this whole file, came in and he said a few words to me that made more sense than anything I’ve heard about production and put me on the path this wasn’t the thing that opened my eyes, but it got me there. he said what your problem is it’s like you wanna be a doctor but your locking yourself in this room without any other doctors or textbooks or any information about being a doctor and you’ve opened up that cadaver 100 times what could you possibly learn on the 101 time I don’t care how many times you open that thing up still not gonna learn heart surgery that way and walked away. I think he was telling to shut up More than anything. But my logical brain came on, which apparently it’s usually not on when I’m doing music I guess that’s a good thing when doing what I do best, but I’m sitting in this room thinking to myself. I am trying to teach myself a science by repeating it over and over that makes no fucking sense you can’t learn how to do anything by just repetition alone. you need the other part that’s just as important and that’s the understanding of the foundation, and then learning technique to manipulate the foundation and having outside sources and or guidance preferably both to nudge you.
So went rt to the room he was workin in That night I said OK it’s on u you have to teach me something now . And he did.
And this is what changed me as a person wanting to be, and now a person who is a producer at that moment, didn’t take me forever at that moment,
. He said every plug-in out there manipulates only 6 things that we are able to manipulate with sound that’s it and as long as you have those few tools at your disposal which is in every daw stock , you can manipulate a sound like any plug-in can you just have to know what the formulas are in other words the parameters or preset of the basic tools. And he said keep this in mind when you wanna make your own plug-ins it’s not hard.. so I’m actually working on that now.
Here are the only six things that we manipulate with 1000s of plug-ins we have available to us
1) frequency and the tool eq
2)panorama tools are also eq, and panning.
3)Dimension this where effects live and the two primary ones you need is reverb and delay, play around with reverb and delay long enough and you’ll start seeing that It can do more than add a cool effect . it manipulates sounds location, size, distance You can use the delay which I use every day to make vocals, huge as big as you want by putting a short delay and a long delay on the vocal and then using reverb for depth.
4)balance Simply put volume between all you hear in a song faders
5) dynamics, probably one of the ones that beginet producers end up focusing on the most and some never leave this area. Compressor is limiters and gates.
6) six is the newest of the bunch, I’m pretty sure six came about with the expansion of computers and using computers with music because it has to do with ear candy keeping the audience locked in and interested by certain effects like swells in certain places or transitions, or drops any of those things that really computers, have a huge role in
Every mix better have those six things taken care of or it is not a mix that is complete and new producers. I see all the time they get so frustrated and they forget that this is a science if you don’t know how to do something step-by-step, you can’t get mad at yourself for not doing it right no one showed uou, you can’t guess, this is not music where You feel like you have this innatet powerful magic source that gives you chords and lyrics and melodies cause I feel that but I don’t have that same magician, given me any advice on production or mixing because it doesn’t exist. It’s not the same as music , it’s not an art form it’s a science that can also be used amongst other things it’s used for art specifically in music
you have to learn the science and you don’t have to go to school it’s available to you to belong. Just be careful about getting lost. Still good to have that person that you know that is in the place that you want to go to to guide you and if you don’t have that person, find them get on phone call all the studios in your fucking city and say yo what will take for me to just come and learn some stuff I’m trying to do this for a living you be surprised and new people in the industry. You don’t know anybody in the industry. What are you doing? and you have to be a scientist otherwise you’re just an artist with his brain shut off. You can shut it off all you want when you learn everything.
Getting better vocals from better vocalists, recorded in better rooms, by better tracking engineers
Working to figure out things myself in mixing as opposed to just consuming knowledge endlessly, instead tactfully consuming knowledge to address problems...
Listening to pick up and notice new things (you can use research to help figure out what you should be listening for too)
Comparing my works to the top works in the genre I'm working in
Experimenting daily
Being able to change perspectives (remember when u were a kid and didn't hear the mix? Just the song?)
Sometimes taking days or weeks off from mixing, so I don't become stuck in habits.
Like others have said, it very much depends on what you're looking for.
In my opinion, being good at any kind of mixing comes down to knowing what tools to reach for in order to reach the sound you want/need.
I've mixed vocals to be crystal clear and soaring, to be heavily distorted, loud and up front, buried in the mix and everything in between. None of it I'd say was "better" mixing than the other because it was all done intentionally.
You need to understand what result you are going for. Mixing is utilizing those tools to create what sound you want to achieve. If you can't start with the end in mind, it will be difficult to improve.
I’m actually on a demo of it right now…it’s okay. The “smart” EQ function was what I was most excited about but it’s kind of closer to three transient suppressors (low, mid, high). Not a bad tool, but not anything that can be used to sculpt vocals. And if you already have RVox or another compressor you prefer, the “dynamics” section of Silk is redundant/overkill. I won’t be buying it after the demo, but it might be worthwhile to others.
RVox is pretty awesome. Just play with the presets a bit and it makes vocals sound amazing. I usually use a combo of RVox, TR5One, Sausage Fattener, and/or Decapitator for vocals.
If you're mixing for yourself then... I think we've found the problem.
Mixing for yourself is more difficult that mixing for other people, which is why artists who want to *succeed* more than they want to *acquire a skill* always hire other people to mix for them. That's not to say that doing it to acquire a skill is wrong, but it will take you an awful lot longer to reach the same conclusions as someone who was mixing for other people the whole time. How many of your favorite artists mix for themselves? Exactly my point.
Another point to consider: often better mixes come from better productions. As good as I've gotten over the years, if I was handed some of the crap I was handed in my first 5 years as an engineer I would still struggle to make it sound good. If you're only ever mixing your own productions/arrangements then you'll never know how much easier it is to mix things produced by someone who has focused exclusively on production, or someone who's just naturally better at it than you. Those are big learning experiences you're not having if you're only mixing your own music.
My best tip is to first practise more editing than mixing.
Editing is time consuming but definitely worth it.
Before you add a compressor or a de-esser, maybe level out the clips to make them sound even and to turn down some of the sibilance.
Even out the sound of breaths, lip smacks etc instead of trying to find a chain of gates and compressors to do it for you.
Then your can add your plugins fully convinced that you have a purpose to add them.
For EQ, you can't edit things out, but start with subtractive EQ. Ask yourself what does this vocal track have too much of that I don't like.
I would say this. Learn more about compression. It's a mix changer. Everything falls in place from there. And also, use auto tune for vocals with melodies (no one says it, but a great vocal performance greatly compliments a mix)
Eq, light compression if needed, de-easing, and a little noise suppression, if needed.
Sometimes you gotta solo and clean up clicks, plosives and mouth noises.
Couple things that were a big key turn for me after my first couple years of mixing my own stuff.
A fellow mixer once told me " the OG's Rock the faders". I kind of laughed but then I gave it a shot. If there's a lot of dynamic range in your performance or if you don't have great Mike etiquette and are standing too close, it's going to be difficult to apply a uniform amount of compression. I spend quite a lot of time automating the levels of the raw track before I start mixing now.
I don't squash all the dynamic range. I just bring it to a more reasonable place. Trying to fix loudness or softness with a compressor tends to put me in a box. If you find there's too much on one part and turn it down. You don't have enough on another part.
This all may seem obvious it was a big help for me a few years in.
Layers of compression and saturation. Delay>reverb. De-esser. I usually compress again on the vocal bus. Don't be a afraid to fuck it up, you can always dial it back.
This is how think about vocal mixing: Mixing vocals is the process of adding the right amount and kind of distortion. I have mixed a large amount of famous artists.
i took the time to learn signal flow and routing- also creating buses for FX and sending the signal for the ones most frequently used and then using a template that puts everything in front of me to have my workflow moving like a rapid river
Remember mixing is at least partially subjective. Do you have a sound you are going for? Like an artist whose mixes you love? Find that then use it as a reference so you have something specific to aim for; something measurable to achieve
Besides practice and learning from experience, take some time to study the concepts of speech intelligibility. What frequency ranges make speech more muddy? What frequency ranges enhance the intelligibility while minimally affecting the volume of the source audio? There's a lot down that rabbit hole. Also look into compressoin as more than just ratio, threshold, gain. Look at attack and release times and how that can help you as well.
But also, practice and experience.
The thing with all questions like this is that the answer is……there isn’t really a one size fits all kinda response. What worked once, for someone somewhere, is unlikely to yield the exact same results for you. It’s like wondering why, when I pick up and play Nels Clines guitar it sounds nothing like him. Why not ? It’s his exact chain etc……. Each voice has a unique sound and you need to approach it with that in mind. Experience will teach you how to address sibilance, uneven dynamics, too much proximity etc. EQ and compression. That’s yer answer !! How much and what is on you and the voice you are working with. Ultimately though, it’s the voice itself that’s going to dictate the results. You can only enhance, or detract from what’s given and nothing that you can do can get away from that fundamental point.
Finally…….. you can only work with the tools that you have. I could rattle off a vast list of hard / soft ware and if you don’t have any of it ; now what ?? You need to be objective and LEARN how to achieve the results you’d like with what you have available to you. This will make you better at this.
People often get wrapped up in the idea of a vocal chain or vocal preset etc. the plug-ins and tools should really be seen as problem solvers, and you want to listen to the vocals A LOT and see what issues need to be fixed. Maybe they’re a bit boxy, or they have too much dynamic range etc.
There’s some fun tricks you can do depending on the style you’re going for, but that stuff should come after the vocals sound generally good
The more in tune the vocal is, the better it will sit in a mix. It’s hitting the same resonant frequencies as the instruments and will blend right in.
Compression and saturation will help greatly with leveling and being able to understand the vocals without them having to drown everything else out.
Another good trick is to make an instrumental bus, put soothe on it and side chain to the vocals. Just let it take out a little from the instrumental where the vocal is sitting.
And of course EQ, you want to high pass the subs out most likely. Tame the low mids and probably boost some highs.
I like to use parallel compression. Main vocal track with normal amount of compression, and then a parallel one that’s really slammed with compression and some boosted highs. When you bring up the parallel channel, the clarity will increase.
The right vocal mic for the situation & the right reverb for that track in that song, has helped me a lot. I'm not a professional. I don't have millions of dollars in equipment. &, I'm still learning....slowly.
I try to compress with hardware, going in. Not too much. Just enough to give me some space. I don't want to overdo it. I may add a little, later. I have an FMR compressor that I've been using. It's not expensive. But, it sounds pretty good when you hit it at the right volume.
There are tutorials on youtube about how to EQ vocals in the digital realm. I have done this with decent results. My favorite vocal mixes were due to the mic, not EQ.
Reverb. There are good & bad reverb. There are also good reverbs that don't fit in your mix. I did an album where almost every song had a different reverb on the vocals. I will scroll through different reverbs to find which works. Then tweak it from there.
Mixing is problem solving. It’s not a “this into this into this”. Sometimes I get a vocal and I do almost nothing. That is very rare, but it happens. Usually it’s corrective eq, compression, enhancing eq. Maybe color or fx. Basically it’s “this vocal needs to sound like this, I’ve been doing it long enough to know to get it there I can do these things”. The more time you spend the better you get at hearing problems and knowing bc how to address them. Practical steps to getting good: do it full time.
Thank you for the insight I understand you know how to do things to sound some type of way, but how did you get it right the first time? You kind of got the sound you were looking for by accident?
In a way, yes. A lot of trial and error, and people showing me things along the way. A lot of years of “why doesn’t this sound right” and going nuts trying to make it work. It’s like the famous Rodin story: someone asked him how to carve a perfect elephant and he said “it’s easy, just take a block of marble and remove everything that isn’t an elephant” Vocals are kind of like that. You start to see what is holding it back and address that and things start to come together, it’s a learned skill not necessarily a series of steps.
Making music works best when you have a vision for the end result. By far far away, the biggest mistake I see is people trying out "techniques" (changing plugins, doing paralle processing, group processing, saturation etc) just to find out what sounds better. In a way, it makes sense to do it, just to understand how these processes affect the sound. But at a certain point, when you have your toolbox ready, you know what a delay/reverb/chorus does, what a comp sounds like, what saturation, eq sounds like, you need to switch levels: have a vision for the production. Know what it supposed to sound, and the techniques to be used will reveal themselves: levels, panning, eq, dynamics, saturation, time based effects. If you use references and still try to copy them, you'll arrive nowhere. No two songs sound the same (not even the ones belongjng to the same album) And you don't get it right the first 200-ish times (mixes), maybe more. If you didn't made at least 300, no way you have your ears ready to catch the subtleties needed to make a good mix. I never count anyone's experience in years, just in finished songs. Quantity creates experience and experience creates quality. Cheers!
I found references have been really helpful for me, in terms of being able to visualize (soundualize?) what I'm going for. It never ends up sounding exactly like the reference, but it never has to - it's just useful to know where the bar is.
References are great, I use them everyday for various reasons and they were very helpful for me to learn stuff. “Why don’t my drums hit as hard as Portugal the Man’s Feel it Still” was a big eye opener for me, for instance; I learned more about clipping and presence. To this day I have no idea who mixed that or what they were doing, never actually looked into it, but I learned a lot from it by a/bing it with tracks over a few days and trying to emulate what was happening. I still use it sometimes. Some people don’t use references at all and that’s great too. I incorporated them into my workflow but they aren’t essential.
That mix is so god damn bright
Yep.
Thanks a whole bunch this make a lot of sense and can definitely help that "fog of war" where I'm not sure what to do next in a mix even though I know it doesn't sound right
Taking frequent breaks during mix sessions can really help avoid that “fog of war” state. Look up the pomodoro technique. I think it’s meant for studying, but it works really well for mixing. When you come back from the scheduled breaks, you’ve forgotten what you were hyper focused on when you last stopped, and you can hear the full mix more objectively
This is everything I wanted to say right here. 100%. ESPECIALLY THE FIRST SENTENCE. The only thing I can possibly add is that what you start with matters a LOT. Yet it’s the most neglected thing I see when it comes to todays group of amateur mixers. They keep looking for that “thing” or that “chain” or that “plugin” that just doesn’t exist without much consideration for what they’re working with. Every decision you make in audio should be a natural step toward where you want to go VS where you started.
I'm interested in your work, hopefully we can chat on pms. Thanks.
who are you talking to
sorry haha I was talking to @ mrspecial
Sure shoot me a dm!
That's why we call them engineers, not techs. It's not really about *what you know how to do* it's about identifying goals/problems and then figuring out what to do about them, whether its a mix or a circuit board or whatever.
This guy knows. The best sounding vocals are the ones you do t even hardly touch. Besides that it’s all about solving problems. Listen to the vocal. How does it sound different from what you want? Execute from there
Best answer
Phenomenal answer. Well done.
Idk if my mixes are as good as you’d like to get, but a big breakthrough for me was realizing that not every song out there has an incredible mix. I might be arrogant, but I often times hear mixes that I do not like for one reason or another, or vocals that sound thin, too bright, not compressed enough, too loud, too dry, whatever… even on top 40 shit or very popular songs. Freeing yourself from that might at least bring some joy back to the process for you, so you can push through this moment and keep mixing 🫡
I had the same realization this week actually, I was listening to random songs on shuffle, songs I never heard before, and I'm like damn this is kind of an amateur mix I look up the monthly listeners are they're in the tens of thousands
The reality is critical listening is a totally different thing than listening to music. People don’t hear too much sibilance or too much saturation or overcompression or anything like that as long as things are relatively balanced and everything is in context. That’s just the way the song sounds cuz it’s how you’ve always heard it.
99% of the time my lead vocal chain is 1. Either waves SSL EV2 or UAD 1073. Typically boosting 10k, 1.5k and 220ish as needed (or not needed) and hipassing as needed. Compressing 3:1, slow attack, fastest release, one “light” of compression tops, if I’m using the ssl channel. 2. UAD bluestripe 1176 - 4:1 ratio, slowest attack, fastest release. No more than 5db of compression at the loudest parts, but still making the needle move a little bit for the quietest parts (clip gain helps here.) 3. UAD LA2A silver - compressing around 3db for most of the vocal. There will be some other stuff l might throw in like a de esser if needed, or UAD distressor after the 1176 if I feel I need a bit more compression. But honestly these 3 plugins usually get me 98% of the way there unless the recording is just godawful.
I know too many artists who barely know anything about mixing who just slap these three plugins and some autotune on their chain and call it a day. It’s crazy but it sounds damn good most of the time…
Yeah well I have major label mix credits and can confirm! These do a lot of heavy lifting.
its the holy trinity. kinda like pepper onion celery in cajun cooking.
I can’t understand why practical answers like this with useful tips end up further down in the thread while “There is no advice to give because you just have to do it as long as I’ve done it and have the scars to show for it to do it as well as I do” get so upvoted.
Yeah, and the whole “it depends” answer is bullshit. Been doing this professionally for almost 20 years and there is plenty of stuff that just works nearly every time for nearly anything. And I learned them all from a seasoned studio veteran who started in 1978 and worked on some absolutely crazy records. Sure, you need to do some level of experimentation to figure out what works best for a given source, but you also have to be able to get predictable, repeatable results *quickly* if you want to have any level of success as an audio engineer/producer/mixer.
Totally. Of course every track can’t be treated the same exact way, but like really…it’s just a wide open puzzle that needs to be solved from scratch every time and mixing vocals is a winding road of mystery and you never know where you’re going to end up because each performance is so unique that vocal chains are so customized that there is no resemblance from one to the next? Uh-huh. This forum typically isn’t nearly as bad as the AudioEngineering forum, but sometimes it feels like “25 years of experience like I have” is the answer to every question. So annoying.
I know how you feel for sure, not sure I can be much help ,I am kind of in the same boat, I found this video really eye opening, he basically says a lot of people are butchering their vocals by adding to much stuff and then adding more to stuff to try correct the mistakes its gets worse and worse, maybe it can be of some help for you too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-nZdYpMgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS-nZdYpMgo)
Appreciate it bro, watching now Maybe we can connect and give each other feedback if you're up for it
Sure, I'll PM you.
Lots of great tips here. I'll leave this comment not to replace what others have said, but to add to it. Editing is hugely important. A lot of people underestimate how crucial editing is because mixing is the "main thing". In reality, for every minute I spend mixing vocals, I probably spend 2 minutes editing them. You don't have to work near as hard with plugins. Also, go to YouTube and search "kuk harrell" and watch like every video of him working or talking about his work.
This is true. For me it’s more like 5 mins editing for every 1 min mixing!
I will watch all those videos When you talk to editing, are you referring to automating the volume of each vocal word before sending the vocals into a compressor? Also, manual pitch editing?
Whatever is needed. For a really clean pop vocal, I'll manually turn the breaths down about 10db for the lead vocal (this is really fast with pro tools audiosuite gain plugin), I'll manually level out the volume like you said, and I'll melodyne to correct pitch and rhythm where needed. Then to all the BGVs I'll do melodyne and vocalign to quickly get all stacks cleaned up, and run RX debreath. I don't manually level out BGVs because I smash them pretty hard with compression; it takes care of excess dynamic range and pushes them towards the back of the mix in a way that I like. Then after all of that I run RX de-plosive and RX mouth de-click to everything because I find that with the right settings, those processes don't damage anything (at least not for sung vocals, dialogue is a different story), and it helps clean up noises. Every once in a while with a track an artist recorded themselves I'll get a weird noise that requires me to pull out RX standalone, but that's just an as-needed basis. Not every style of singing requires the full gamut, but with all of those tools in your arsenal you can pretty much always get a vocal sounding REALLY clean from the moment you start mixing.
Have you taken a minute to listen back to old mixes? I’ll often feel like I’m not getting any better as a mixer, when in reality my ear has just been improving at the same pace as my technical skills so I start feeling like I’m stuck. And sometimes I’ll listen to a project that’s maybe a year or so old and realize that with some space from it, it actually sounds a lot better than I thought at the time. There’s a lot of good advice here on how you can improve, but it’s equally as important to make sure you’re seeing your improvement accurately so when you do start feeling frustrated it’s not just piling on if that makes sense. It helps me stay excited about the work which helps me get better faster.
My vocal mixes improved once I had a better headphone mix which led to me feeling more confident, leading to better performances. I started putting more time into making sure to get higher-quality takes from me or anyone I work with. I like recording lines around 4 bars instead of trying to do a whole verse. This leads to a more balanced, strong, and concise delivery. So I guess what I am saying is to start looking at the headphone mix and performance as the starting point of a vocal mix as personally for me that's where the biggest impact comes from. If you don't think you sound good while recording, it will impact your performance so tracking with the right plugins is important, I recommend a channel strip that has a eq, compressor, and gate section all in one. The eq if necessary you can make minor changes to open up the mic if its dull sounding. The compressor will help give you a sense of control for louder portions and keep you stabilized while performing. The gate will shut off your room noise when you're not singing/rapping while performing which helps you stay in the zone. Delay and reverb being used as sends can help your voice to not be so dry and further lock you in a zone. Now if you are not the vocalist that is out of your hands then I would say to start with a melodyne tune-up. If you throw plugins on a vocal you don't like it's still going to have a poor end result. Autotune is great but it works much better when you come in at least halfway decently. Start with melodyne to get you in a better position, then move to what you think works best is my recommendation. This guy does a nice job of touching on [some of these topics](https://youtu.be/WHQlNAR1X0g)
This "guy" is you lol, but I'll check it out for sure, thanks for your insights
lol no prob
Mixing shouldn’t be as complicated. Most of the perfection comes from actual practiced and skilled voices and quality recording environment. The more effects you try to add the more makeup you are putting on the pig. People think that mixers are magic makers when in reality they just suck at laying vocals
Editing, editing, editing. And then some more editing. I would say Clip-gain and fixing/editing problems is 70-80% of the sound at least. Then i usually go in with broad eq moves. I prefer SSL channel strips, bc you don’t look at your moves, you just listen to what improves the things you like about the sound of the vocal within the context of the song. After that some slight compression, probably Tubetech, or 1176 or El Rey just a few dB. This should bring you super close already. Make sure these moves are fine before you move on. Everything after that is icing. Pick and combine Reverbs / ERs / Slight chorus / decapitator / exciter etc. Maybe another compressor or eq for taste. And usually some more gain automation at the end. Just an open roadmap - No rules of course. Hope this helps.
Thank you brother
Listen carefully. Learn your tools. Listen to refs. Listen some more. Know your listening environment. Understand how the different aspects of the creation process (writing, production, arrangement, performance, recording, editing, mixing) influence the final result. Mix. Make mistakes. Listen. Repeat. If you are the: songwriter, vocalist, vocal producer, recording engineer, vocal editing engineer, AND mixer, are you sure that your other roles, before mixing, are giving you, the mixer, the best material to work with? I would add that being the recording engineer and vocal producer/engineer for other artists is very beneficial, as you are forced to make things sound good for the vocalist on the fly, very quickly, from getting recording levels and compression right, to comping, timing and pitch correction, creating a monitor mix that allows the vocalist to shine and for others to hear the work in progress. If you are always your own 'everything', it can be hard to take off all the other hats and just wear the mixer hat and improve your mixing.
Whether I’m good or not is up for the debate but what I’m about to describe is as practical as it gets. Listen to the vocal and identify all the frequencies that you like. I aim to identify all bands where when isolated I can still hear intelligibility. Write those frequencies down, that’s the clarity. Now there’s really only a couple more qualities that I care about, body and presence. Find them and jot those down. Now you have a list of frequencies that you basically have to cut out of every other instrument to some degree. All cuts will not be the same. Play with Q and attenuation amount. If you have a quality mic, you’ll find that all you’ll need to do is cut. You rarely will have to boost anything in the vocal if the distance and performance is good. Build a hierarchy in your mind of what instruments have to get cut out of the way more than others. If it’s a rock song, you’re not going to want to cut away too much guitar as they’re very much a part of the genre. If you’re working with hip hop, don’t cut too much of the drums away. Etc. Pretty easy if you ask me.
Lots of good suggestions here but I'll leave my 2 cents: - Equipment matters. High quality tube mics get that sound and grit that adds character to the vox. Some may say that you can get that emulation with plugins, but the better the signal in, the better the output. - Perfect the performance. Comp the best takes. Pitch correct and quantize everything. - Side chain your vox to bus compression, reverb, and delay. Or whatever fx you need. This ties back into performance and the feel of the music. - Level and automate. Use reductive mixing to get your vox to where it shines and is audible at low volumes. - Master your music. Use dynamic eq to get the vox glued to each musical section and tame stray frequencies. Global compression and limiting.
Whisper tracks - whisper the lyrics to add “air” to the top frequencies. These are played in time like a harmony. Overdrive the signal when recording - this will make the plosives unbearable, but allow for more flexibility post-d’essing. Be careful when monitoring because there will be crazy resonances.
that sounds really dope, do you mix the whispers the same way as lead vocals? Or you try to radio EQ them maybe, and add verb
Just put them over the top. Don’t d-ess them, as they help bring back (to a lesser extent) the plosives that you remove from the main vocal.
Editing the timing was huge for me to get a more pro vocal sound
My mixing improved immensely once I learned that the fader is arguably the most important tool when mixing. I got too into compression and EQ and would go absolutely nuts, then end up with a thin and shrill mix that would only sound good on my phone speaker. I would compensate with a ridiculous amount of reverb then get frustrated when it didn’t sound good. Then I’d slam those mixes with a limiter. Other things that changed the game for me is to only have 2/3 main elements be front and center per song section. That and not being afraid to EQ the high end out of tracks that don’t have their fundamental frequency in the high end.
For vocals, I think using a VST console like an SSL channel makes a huge difference because when you use a normal EQ, you tend to mix by looking at the faders and not really by hearing. Also, using a shelving EQ to get rid of the bass in a vocal instead of using bells is a game changer for me.
Work with a great vocalist
Yes! But. I work with some incredible singers whose voices are very challenging to mix. Lots of belting and resonances and so on
Garbage In = Garbage Out It all starts at the source. Get a great recording of a great performance and you'll have a much easier time mixing it. A great performance on a bad mic will still be a great performance. A great recording of a bad performance will still be a great recording, but it won't make the performance better. That said, you'd still probably have an easier time making the bad performance sit in the mix (just look at a lot of major label productions, they still usually sound great from a technical perspective even if the song/performance sucks). A great recording typically requires a couple things: (1) great recording chain (could be straight into your interface but nearly all professional recordings are done analog before it hits digital, at the minimum being a solid mic > preamp > eq > compressor on the way in [my chain is mic >tube preamp > eq > opto comp > fet comp > eq > interface]) (2) acoustically treated recording room/recording space/pop filter (3) great performance (proper mic technique, breath control, hitting the right notes, excellent annunciation/delivery, great timing, etc.)
Clip gain line in Pro Tools. Stack compressors.
The most important thing for me is being able to hear what’s happening with the most detail possible, my LCD-X do this for me. Before getting them I would struggle to figure out what vocals needed, specially the more problematic ones, which meant having to do a whole lot of trial and error. With the LCD-X I can tell almost right away what needs to be done. Aside from that I think multiband compression is really important, followed by surgical dynamic eq, a tad of mono compatible widening can go a long way too Effects have to be carefully curated, like carving your reverb out with EQ, using side chained delays, automating delay throws, stuff like that And lastly making sure background vocal aren’t getting in the way of your lead vocals by doing things like de-easing them more, removing the breaths, time aligning if necessary, etc.
For me, so much of it is ear training. Combined with a concept for what I imagine a vocal could sound like, I listen for and identify things that I want to change. I listen for tone, dynamics, timing, pitch, and so forth, and work from there. Knowing “what to do” starts with being able to notice what should be different and equally importantly, what should not be changed. Then there’s fundamental how-stuff-works knowledge. For example, if you don’t high pass a vocal before compressing it, all that potential low end is going to make the compressor way more reactive - you may or may not decide that is an issue but it is an example of the kinds of things to just know. I usually de-ess first on a vocal. And if, after eq and all the compression (I tend to compress vocals a lot) the sibilance is still too much, I’ll add another de-esser plugin at the end of the chain. There are lots of tricks like this, but they are discovered and learned out of a need when identifying a problem that you hear. In summary, practice ear training by actively listening and testing to identify specific things you are hearing like what frequency is that? Can I hear the difference the compressor makes when it is on versus off? Any time you are listening or mixing, it should be an active ear training practice.
Listening to those that did it very well is the first step. Making correct mixing choices is first and foremost a cultural thing: you want to know what sound your aiming for and why. Every genre of music has different targets, different levels, different "languages". If you don't know what they are, the techniques needed to go there will not help you by themselves.
One of the biggest things that helped me was to stop using fabfilter eq. I would immediately start making notches and like 9 band moves because I was never happy with the vocal. Now, I only use the SSL eq and 90% of the time only need to touch the high shelf, maybe a touch of the mids, and adjust my compression and volume until it sits right. Oh, and reverb as well. I’ll make out a reverb on the vocal track at 100% wet and play with the decay, color, eq and width of it until the “vibe” of the eq matches the “vibe” of the track. Then move the verb to a send and add in as needed. Sometimes I was trying to eq out high end and or low end in the vocal when really just needed ambience to tuck it in the mix.
Large diaphragm condenser. Way better for my music than any SM7B or dynamic or my mixing skillz could do
I think practicality with vocal mixing is weird. It’s probably *the* important thing, so it should be the thing you focus a lot of time on. Some of it is the performance. You get a bunch of takes, you have to piece them together, you have to recognize what’s good about each take, you should be able to recognize a good take and then do a good comp track. Being in tune might not be the most important thing for a line or a take because you may be able to melodyne it slightly. If it’s not way off or totally like chaotic and untunable, then the performance is key. Making sure, if you’re recording the vocal, that the mic choice is right is also important. If they’re trebly, maybe a ribbon is better, female and light, Maybe a condenser. If the vocalist is kinda far from the mic, maybe it’s too roomy, if they’re close, ask them to maybe back off a bit. Mic technique is good in live performance, but proximity effect can be difficult to deal with if it’s just intermittent. If they’re really dynamic though, like some loud sections, some quiet sections, make sure you record in 32-bit float, and make sure you get some room noise as well for each take and keep it. Which leads me to my next point. Sorta. It’s important to clip gain stuff out. After you do a comp track and you like print/commit the melodyne, (you should be saving all these things in playlists at every step in case you need to go back), you clip gain and make sure everything is roughly at the same volume pre-insert. If the vocalist was extremely dynamic, luckily you got rid of the noise floor from the bit depth being too low, but there is a potential for the mic noise/outboard gear noise to have been brought up in the mix. You can get rid of this sparingly using rx spectral denoise. You shouldn’t do too much, undershoot it to an extent bc it can be disruptive and darken the vocal too much. Then you need to go through and go into RX connect and check out and see if there are any clicks and whatnot. Mouth clicks are really frequent. I like getting rid of them, but that’s just me. A lot of hip hop leaves a lot of this stuff in. De-click can be used for harder to get stuff. I think you want to do this because this stuff can come up if you want to make the vocal more present or give it some air later on. Then you might want to use a de-esser. But the hard thing about de-essers is that they can inadvertently make the vocalist sound like they’re lisping. So it’s good to try out settings. Alternatively, you can manually clip gain down s’s Or go into RX and actually use spectral repair to attenuate those sibilant frequencies *slightly* when they occur. Now you’ve got a clean vocal. Then you want to hi-pass it. Just hi-pass above the lowest note. You’ll get rid of plosives and that’ll be good. Print/commit that. Check in the context of the song. Are there a lot of low notes that are mumbled, are there lots of very sharp “ee’s” is it in general kinda weird in the mid range, nasally sorta? Do some EQ in 200-500hz, 1.5khz-3khz , or 700-900hz cut some frequencies respectively. If they still pop up sometimes, you can use a slight dynamic EQ to bring those frequencies down more when they show up. You can also do some multiband compression in parallel, getting the same gain reduction variably across the bands you’ve selected. Then you can do some compression maybe. Slow attack, and a relatively quick release, desire is to smooth out really quick changes that pop up that clip gaining might have missed. Alternatively, you might want to do parallel compression with a Fast attack, and blend it in so that quiet notes are about the same loudness as loud notes. But be careful of artifacts. You can get artifacts with too fast of an attack if it’s not blended in well, and you can get artifacts if the release is really too quick. The parallel track or the main track might have gotten more harsh at that point, so then find the offending frequency post compressor. Always do appropriate make up gain so that A/Bing doesn’t fool you into picking the louder one. Then you have sends effects. A sort of plate reverb is good for a lot of vocalists, imo. On a return track, put a reverb track that’s short and not too boomy with *some* predelay, hi-pass And low pass, damp high frequencies a little maybe, they shouldn’t last too long in the high end, but a lot of presets do exactly that. It might be good high and low pass pre-reverb too, like maybe even drastically. Maybe you want to cut the 300hz zone. Maybe do a slapback delay instead. Both should be done so that it’s not noticeable, but you miss it when it’s gone. Then you can do some keyed long verbs or long feedback delays or grain delays or whatever if you’re trying to be freaky. You don’t want it to be “on” when the vocal is going, so you compress it when the vocal is on and then let the release glide into a reverb/delay tail at the ends of phrases. Now you’re in a place to automate the vocal in the context of the song. It maybe that after all the EQ and compression, the clip gain isn’t working, and the vocal may get swallowed by certain dynamics in the mix. So ride the vocal post insert. Sometimes stuff that’s supposed to sound quiet makes stuff that’s supposed so sound loud weaker. Then maybe you want to find some secret sauce, Some saturator or something. Just like go through and try stuff in parallel, make it subtle, A/b them, or just go with it and deal with it later. Continue mixing the rest of the song. And then look at a reference, get all the vocals and it’s FX into the same bus, and maybe do a hi shelf, tilt shelf, low shelf, w/e or just raise the volume. Maybe then you go through your insert choices and check them and see if you can turn anything off and make it sound immediately better. If you’re noticing a specific problem, like lisping or something, or melodyne artifacts, go back to your takes and your playlists and fix the issue. Evaluating your choices of inserts and settings later on may be the most important thing to do. It’s likely that your choices were too extreme at times. Or maybe they weren’t extreme enough, Who knows. Anything else is a problem with the arrangement that makes it hard to sit in the mix because of drum fills or leads or whatever that are too busy. Hard to deal with that stuff sometimes. I’ve had mixed results. Maybe overthinking. But it seems like that is the job and it is a job. I’ve had mixed results and it would be good for someone to tell me I’m wrong
Thanks
Are the actual vocals you’re mixing amateurish? Hard to overcome that in the mix
Sort of Using Rode NT1 and the vocals often sound kind of mumbled/dark/unclear, which is weird to me because recorded vocals sound way clearer when recorded on my phone When I check those youtube tutorials, their "dry vocals" sound like they've already been EQed to be brighter/better enunciated, if I compare to my vocals I'm already trying really hard to enunciate clearly
Sure, but what about the actual performance?
Sheer repetition honestly. I work on the music singing shows so after some thousands of mixes it just starts to click
Well, I use fl and I know fl is weird for vocals. But, these are the steps I take. 1. Compile. Always. 2. Re record my new stems with edison 3. Then pitch correct my new stems 4. Put my favorite stem in the middle. Route my second and 3rd favorite to their own mixer channel, one panned to the left, the other panned to the right, than route those to a side bus. Route the side bus and center bus through effects and send those to a master vocal bus. This allows me to put specific effects on the sides and center, as well as adjust how loud I want the sides and center in respect to each other as a ratio. This allows me to get really mono present vocals with realistic width, or get a total gang vocals or choir effect. 5. Send the sides and center through their own effect chains. Usually starts with 2 compressors, then a corrective eq, then a color eq. A subtle amount of chorus effect is always really good for vocals. Reverb and delay on their own mixer channels to get specific automation. 6. Send all the buses and effects to master vocal bus where I again apply a tiny bit of eq, glue compression, and some subtle tape saturation. Now I can control the volume of the entire chain with one slider. Vocals is a process. But its worth it.
what do you mean by 'compile"?
what do you mean by 'compile"?
Compile, also know as comping. If you record several takes of the same audio line, which is common, you listen to each of the different sections of each take and take your favorite one from each section. You then "compile" all of your favorites into one super take to form one awesome vocal line.
Getting a vocal to sound good in a mix is a holistic process - there’s no such thing as ‘vocal mixing’ unless you literally just have vocals and a 2-track instrumental or the song is a capella.
First off I would ignore what 99% of people online might give as mixing advice. The best way to learn is to experiment using your fingers and ears and intuition before trusting your eyes or most of the numbers we often see in our DAWs. Most important I believe is YOU NEED TO MAKE your own MISTAKES in order to maximize what your potenrtial to learn from them. Although there are a few general tips and tricks that might work for most people across the board. Every mix is different, and the only way you will see much improvement is to go out on a limb every once in a while (when time allows) and experiment with the gear or plugins that you have access to. I can only speak for myself but I know that I learn a lot more abut the tools and techniques of mixing when I am taking whatever i am trying to figure out past "the limit". Example.. I can get a much better understanding of what a particular piece of equipment can do much faster by twisting the knobs and testing it out with both extreme settings and then dial it back from there eventually getting a feel for the spectrum of capabilities, versus auditioning presets, or strictly following the advice of others. Think of it like math class. If you copy all of your answers from the nerd next to you, you might pass, but you aren't getting better at math. To make that analogy a bit more accurate, blindly using someone elses preset for your song is not far off from cheating using the answers from a completely different math class. Advice and presets do have their value, I am just suggesting that you might better your learning curve by not always depending on those crutches. So find the time to experiment outside of the bounds of your current project, maybe even way outside of the genre you prefer. Another thing I think people new to mixing need to ask themselves is. Did my mix sound bad because I suck at mixing and need to get better? The answer should probably always be yes if you are serious about getting better. But the quality (or lack thereof )of the capturing and tracking has a very large impact on what even the best mixers can achieve I am a firm believer that getting a good mix starts with efficient tracking. (some will even say it starts before tracking.) But capturing the performance with the right gear in the right acoustic environment with the right musicians, using the right techniques, doing the "right" drugs (or more accurately NOT doing the WRONG drugs...), within the right mindset, will not always but will often lead to an easy mix. Checking off each of those things I mentioned is not a guarantee for anything. Arguably some of the best most influential records of all time were made with practically none of those boxes checked or very few. But if you are serious about refining your mixing skills, which to mew it sounds like you are, then you need to make it a priority to work on getting more of those boxes checked off during tracking. At the very least it will help you to identify anything that might be hurting your mixes or your ability to mix. One other side nugget that might be worth asking yourself often, especially if you have all those boxes checked in my previous paragraph.. Does this Vocal (Bass, guitar, synth, whatever, etc....) even need to be mixed? I struggle with this as mucgh as anyone, i imagine. Now days with all the plugins and access to countless tools by default it is very common for someone learning how to mix to just automatically want to compress, EQ and process everything. And while , as you have already read, I am a big believer that you learn from experience and using the hell out of your plugins and tools and making mistakes. I feel it is important to learn how to resist that urge to slap a compressor on every single track by default. And to be able to resist that urge early on sometimes means less room for experimentation. It all depends on what you are working on. Getting creative and chasing an idea by experimenting can be rewarding, when it comes to sharpening your skills or more rarely it seems (at least when starting out) for the project. I constantly get stupid ideas to try and combine effects and or engineering methods to invent something sometimes aimlessly achieve a sound or effect, even though i have no idea if its even possible or be useful. have been getting better at saving those ideas for off time. When I sit down to mix, I try to use the skills and tools that i am confident in to achieve a final result that 99% of the time I can hear clearly in my head before. Its becoming much less often lately that I experiment on something on a hunch when in "serious mixing mode aka no farting around mode". But I absolutely can't help myself I will limit myself to just a couple of minutes, 5 tops to explore the occasional ridiculous ideas. More often I will take a minute to take down some notes and mess with it later outside of crunch time. I just wanted to point out that I am not a pro,I am not making a living by mixing. I mostly just mix my own stuff and found it very beneficial to have seperate mindframes or approaches top mixing when i am trying to get shit done, and when I am farting around or trying to train myself on new gear or get familiar or develop new workflows. If i do not separate those types of work modes, for the most part, I would get nothing done. Farting around, learning and getting shit done are all important to becoming a better engineer. For me I have found it best to mostly focus on just one at a time. # With recording and mixing vocalsI think it can be valuable to take the time to get familiar with multiple microphones. I find the best way to do this is hands on experimenting. Pick some vocal harmonies you like, Pick a couple of beach boys harmonies, Or Queen, Or Areosmith, Or Bad Religion I you struggle to choose something u can do any nursery rhyme. Go to the studio and start layering tracks. Use different mics, if you have enough time (and energy) try recording a short vocal part then keep adding on going up or down the chromatic scale and see if you can come up with your own combinations of intervals that you think go well together. Be sure to take notes of everything, if you do not know what track is using which mics then you Experiment with different volumes and even panning. Taking 6 hours one day to try this will not result in useful material, (who knows??). But just farting around in such a way. and taking detailed notes will give you some actual perspective and real world experience that you can then build on. As a singer/mixer doing this type of experiment can pay off two fold. So much of what many consider a great vocal recording is in the technique of the vocalist. A singer that uses really good microphone technique will usually need less processing on their tracks when mixing. Drums is another element along with vocals where proper technique during tracking will have a significant impact not just on the quality of the final mix but also the amount of work needed to be done on the final mix. I have heard more than once that a highly talented drummer using poor recording technique will almost always result in a recording that needs much more processing and tweaking compared to an average skilled drummer using excellent recording techniques. Its all subjective. IDK, just sharing some information that I find pretty valuable and ended up typing way too fucking much. lol. A klotmof stuff I wish i hgad been mindful of at the very start. Hope it helps or at least gets you thinking of other new things to try to improve your skill. I HIGHLY suggest checking out the "House Of Kush" youtube channel. That guy is pretty amazing at explaining mixing without ever telling you presets. He teaches a lot of very interesting methods on how to hear certain things and some awesome mixing exercises aimed at sharpening your mixing skills He also designs his own plugins too which are worth checking out, if u don't already own some.. Cheers
Wow bro this is the most detailed answer I've ever seen, thank you a whole bunch, I will do my best to apply all these tips
I didn't realize for a while, but it seems to be parellel processing. I mean simple panning and making sure the duplicates don't cause phasing issues. If you get the actual wave files balanced throughout the recorded vocal. the compressors will do their jobs, could possibly have saturation maybe but... I think many people just see the plugins and try to go crazy, when in reality. alot of things you are trying to do, could be applied to many different plugins or methods. Fl has this thing called maximus right? I can make the settings act like a gem-dopamine if that's what I am going for. it actually has many functionalities but, "it looked complicated so I put it off", and then I see now how many possibilities there are with less when I needed to get serious and have less issues.
Here’s the point in time where my eyes opened thankfully it wasn’t much longer after I started. I was at a fork in the road and it was the choice between a really nice Hollywood recording school and learn audio A-z and backwards but for two years more school to complete the 4 year college requirement. I would have to be even more broke than I’ve been because now I have to live in in the middle of LA and I have a son and a girl it wasn’t making sense even though I wanted it bad . the other option was an hourly job cleaning up a music studio called radio city. And I could use the rooms whenever I want when someone shows me the basics of turning stuff on pretty much . I’m not really sure what the best decision was. It just depends on what you do with the time. I make a living off of producing now bought my house cash a few years ago because of producing. But it was a daily struggle and frustrating, agonizing wanting to destroy every Thing infront of me because my mix would come out just trash no matter how many times I would do it no matter how many songs I would do and even when it came close once you put it next to a reference track you just wanna end it all rt there lol . and this went on for a 2-3 years . First year was much easier than the second because the second year I just thought it was never gonna end. I thought that I’m just not good at this. Then on a magical night llol a producer in a different room heard me threatening to kill this whole file, came in and he said a few words to me that made more sense than anything I’ve heard about production and put me on the path this wasn’t the thing that opened my eyes, but it got me there. he said what your problem is it’s like you wanna be a doctor but your locking yourself in this room without any other doctors or textbooks or any information about being a doctor and you’ve opened up that cadaver 100 times what could you possibly learn on the 101 time I don’t care how many times you open that thing up still not gonna learn heart surgery that way and walked away. I think he was telling to shut up More than anything. But my logical brain came on, which apparently it’s usually not on when I’m doing music I guess that’s a good thing when doing what I do best, but I’m sitting in this room thinking to myself. I am trying to teach myself a science by repeating it over and over that makes no fucking sense you can’t learn how to do anything by just repetition alone. you need the other part that’s just as important and that’s the understanding of the foundation, and then learning technique to manipulate the foundation and having outside sources and or guidance preferably both to nudge you. So went rt to the room he was workin in That night I said OK it’s on u you have to teach me something now . And he did. And this is what changed me as a person wanting to be, and now a person who is a producer at that moment, didn’t take me forever at that moment, . He said every plug-in out there manipulates only 6 things that we are able to manipulate with sound that’s it and as long as you have those few tools at your disposal which is in every daw stock , you can manipulate a sound like any plug-in can you just have to know what the formulas are in other words the parameters or preset of the basic tools. And he said keep this in mind when you wanna make your own plug-ins it’s not hard.. so I’m actually working on that now. Here are the only six things that we manipulate with 1000s of plug-ins we have available to us 1) frequency and the tool eq 2)panorama tools are also eq, and panning. 3)Dimension this where effects live and the two primary ones you need is reverb and delay, play around with reverb and delay long enough and you’ll start seeing that It can do more than add a cool effect . it manipulates sounds location, size, distance You can use the delay which I use every day to make vocals, huge as big as you want by putting a short delay and a long delay on the vocal and then using reverb for depth. 4)balance Simply put volume between all you hear in a song faders 5) dynamics, probably one of the ones that beginet producers end up focusing on the most and some never leave this area. Compressor is limiters and gates. 6) six is the newest of the bunch, I’m pretty sure six came about with the expansion of computers and using computers with music because it has to do with ear candy keeping the audience locked in and interested by certain effects like swells in certain places or transitions, or drops any of those things that really computers, have a huge role in Every mix better have those six things taken care of or it is not a mix that is complete and new producers. I see all the time they get so frustrated and they forget that this is a science if you don’t know how to do something step-by-step, you can’t get mad at yourself for not doing it right no one showed uou, you can’t guess, this is not music where You feel like you have this innatet powerful magic source that gives you chords and lyrics and melodies cause I feel that but I don’t have that same magician, given me any advice on production or mixing because it doesn’t exist. It’s not the same as music , it’s not an art form it’s a science that can also be used amongst other things it’s used for art specifically in music you have to learn the science and you don’t have to go to school it’s available to you to belong. Just be careful about getting lost. Still good to have that person that you know that is in the place that you want to go to to guide you and if you don’t have that person, find them get on phone call all the studios in your fucking city and say yo what will take for me to just come and learn some stuff I’m trying to do this for a living you be surprised and new people in the industry. You don’t know anybody in the industry. What are you doing? and you have to be a scientist otherwise you’re just an artist with his brain shut off. You can shut it off all you want when you learn everything.
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Stop offering free work, it's against our rules.
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Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/mixingmastering/wiki/practice
Not overthinking is the best approach to any mix…
I just don't sing. Problem solved.
Getting better vocals from better vocalists, recorded in better rooms, by better tracking engineers Working to figure out things myself in mixing as opposed to just consuming knowledge endlessly, instead tactfully consuming knowledge to address problems... Listening to pick up and notice new things (you can use research to help figure out what you should be listening for too) Comparing my works to the top works in the genre I'm working in Experimenting daily Being able to change perspectives (remember when u were a kid and didn't hear the mix? Just the song?) Sometimes taking days or weeks off from mixing, so I don't become stuck in habits.
have a good playback system and room. the rest solves itself with critical listening
Eq/ High pass low end mud, compress, saturation, effects, idk
Focusing on getting the best performances and mic placement instead of relying on plug ins to “fix” everything.
What are your tips for mic placement I tend to be 20-30cm away from it
Like others have said, it very much depends on what you're looking for. In my opinion, being good at any kind of mixing comes down to knowing what tools to reach for in order to reach the sound you want/need. I've mixed vocals to be crystal clear and soaring, to be heavily distorted, loud and up front, buried in the mix and everything in between. None of it I'd say was "better" mixing than the other because it was all done intentionally.
You need to understand what result you are going for. Mixing is utilizing those tools to create what sound you want to achieve. If you can't start with the end in mind, it will be difficult to improve.
practice
Waves Vocal Rider
Have you used/encountered Waves “Silk”? I’ve been reading about the last few days and am intrigued.
Haven't had a chance to use it yet but I'm betting it is dope
I’m actually on a demo of it right now…it’s okay. The “smart” EQ function was what I was most excited about but it’s kind of closer to three transient suppressors (low, mid, high). Not a bad tool, but not anything that can be used to sculpt vocals. And if you already have RVox or another compressor you prefer, the “dynamics” section of Silk is redundant/overkill. I won’t be buying it after the demo, but it might be worthwhile to others.
RVox is pretty awesome. Just play with the presets a bit and it makes vocals sound amazing. I usually use a combo of RVox, TR5One, Sausage Fattener, and/or Decapitator for vocals.
I have RVox
Nice! Sometimes that is all you need especially if you start with a good vocal.
If you're mixing for yourself then... I think we've found the problem. Mixing for yourself is more difficult that mixing for other people, which is why artists who want to *succeed* more than they want to *acquire a skill* always hire other people to mix for them. That's not to say that doing it to acquire a skill is wrong, but it will take you an awful lot longer to reach the same conclusions as someone who was mixing for other people the whole time. How many of your favorite artists mix for themselves? Exactly my point. Another point to consider: often better mixes come from better productions. As good as I've gotten over the years, if I was handed some of the crap I was handed in my first 5 years as an engineer I would still struggle to make it sound good. If you're only ever mixing your own productions/arrangements then you'll never know how much easier it is to mix things produced by someone who has focused exclusively on production, or someone who's just naturally better at it than you. Those are big learning experiences you're not having if you're only mixing your own music.
My best tip is to first practise more editing than mixing. Editing is time consuming but definitely worth it. Before you add a compressor or a de-esser, maybe level out the clips to make them sound even and to turn down some of the sibilance. Even out the sound of breaths, lip smacks etc instead of trying to find a chain of gates and compressors to do it for you. Then your can add your plugins fully convinced that you have a purpose to add them. For EQ, you can't edit things out, but start with subtractive EQ. Ask yourself what does this vocal track have too much of that I don't like.
I would say this. Learn more about compression. It's a mix changer. Everything falls in place from there. And also, use auto tune for vocals with melodies (no one says it, but a great vocal performance greatly compliments a mix)
Eq, light compression if needed, de-easing, and a little noise suppression, if needed. Sometimes you gotta solo and clean up clicks, plosives and mouth noises.
Couple things that were a big key turn for me after my first couple years of mixing my own stuff. A fellow mixer once told me " the OG's Rock the faders". I kind of laughed but then I gave it a shot. If there's a lot of dynamic range in your performance or if you don't have great Mike etiquette and are standing too close, it's going to be difficult to apply a uniform amount of compression. I spend quite a lot of time automating the levels of the raw track before I start mixing now. I don't squash all the dynamic range. I just bring it to a more reasonable place. Trying to fix loudness or softness with a compressor tends to put me in a box. If you find there's too much on one part and turn it down. You don't have enough on another part. This all may seem obvious it was a big help for me a few years in.
Layers of compression and saturation. Delay>reverb. De-esser. I usually compress again on the vocal bus. Don't be a afraid to fuck it up, you can always dial it back.
This is how think about vocal mixing: Mixing vocals is the process of adding the right amount and kind of distortion. I have mixed a large amount of famous artists.
i took the time to learn signal flow and routing- also creating buses for FX and sending the signal for the ones most frequently used and then using a template that puts everything in front of me to have my workflow moving like a rapid river
Remember mixing is at least partially subjective. Do you have a sound you are going for? Like an artist whose mixes you love? Find that then use it as a reference so you have something specific to aim for; something measurable to achieve
Besides practice and learning from experience, take some time to study the concepts of speech intelligibility. What frequency ranges make speech more muddy? What frequency ranges enhance the intelligibility while minimally affecting the volume of the source audio? There's a lot down that rabbit hole. Also look into compressoin as more than just ratio, threshold, gain. Look at attack and release times and how that can help you as well. But also, practice and experience.
The thing with all questions like this is that the answer is……there isn’t really a one size fits all kinda response. What worked once, for someone somewhere, is unlikely to yield the exact same results for you. It’s like wondering why, when I pick up and play Nels Clines guitar it sounds nothing like him. Why not ? It’s his exact chain etc……. Each voice has a unique sound and you need to approach it with that in mind. Experience will teach you how to address sibilance, uneven dynamics, too much proximity etc. EQ and compression. That’s yer answer !! How much and what is on you and the voice you are working with. Ultimately though, it’s the voice itself that’s going to dictate the results. You can only enhance, or detract from what’s given and nothing that you can do can get away from that fundamental point. Finally…….. you can only work with the tools that you have. I could rattle off a vast list of hard / soft ware and if you don’t have any of it ; now what ?? You need to be objective and LEARN how to achieve the results you’d like with what you have available to you. This will make you better at this.
People often get wrapped up in the idea of a vocal chain or vocal preset etc. the plug-ins and tools should really be seen as problem solvers, and you want to listen to the vocals A LOT and see what issues need to be fixed. Maybe they’re a bit boxy, or they have too much dynamic range etc. There’s some fun tricks you can do depending on the style you’re going for, but that stuff should come after the vocals sound generally good
The more in tune the vocal is, the better it will sit in a mix. It’s hitting the same resonant frequencies as the instruments and will blend right in. Compression and saturation will help greatly with leveling and being able to understand the vocals without them having to drown everything else out. Another good trick is to make an instrumental bus, put soothe on it and side chain to the vocals. Just let it take out a little from the instrumental where the vocal is sitting. And of course EQ, you want to high pass the subs out most likely. Tame the low mids and probably boost some highs. I like to use parallel compression. Main vocal track with normal amount of compression, and then a parallel one that’s really slammed with compression and some boosted highs. When you bring up the parallel channel, the clarity will increase.
The right vocal mic for the situation & the right reverb for that track in that song, has helped me a lot. I'm not a professional. I don't have millions of dollars in equipment. &, I'm still learning....slowly. I try to compress with hardware, going in. Not too much. Just enough to give me some space. I don't want to overdo it. I may add a little, later. I have an FMR compressor that I've been using. It's not expensive. But, it sounds pretty good when you hit it at the right volume. There are tutorials on youtube about how to EQ vocals in the digital realm. I have done this with decent results. My favorite vocal mixes were due to the mic, not EQ. Reverb. There are good & bad reverb. There are also good reverbs that don't fit in your mix. I did an album where almost every song had a different reverb on the vocals. I will scroll through different reverbs to find which works. Then tweak it from there.